


Say it

by the_authors_exploits



Series: Strangers in Nothing but Name [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, sort of character/relationship study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 18:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6867877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_authors_exploits/pseuds/the_authors_exploits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanda is a strong opponent, Jason thinks, and he starts talking--and he cant stop</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rebuild

“I didn’t think,” Jason huffs out after Wanda’s knocked him down for what seems like the millionth time; he sinks into the mats, stares up at the bright gym lights, and lays still. His chest heaves and sweat drips down his temple. “Hadn’t thought that Pietro would die…”

Wanda looms somewhere above him, but he won’t look at her; she’s not a threat, hasn’t been one for a while.

Jason shakes his head and sweat goes flying; “I mean…when we were in the helicarrier, going for Sokovia, and Pietro was making that…that stupid deal with me and I just…”

Wanda falls next to him and he feels the radiating warmth from her skin; she follows his gaze up to the ceiling and they breathe in tandem.

“I just…and he’s gone.”

She settles her hand, feather light, upon his skin; there’s a spark there, between her fingertips and his wet skin, something metaphysical. Something deeper than skin on skin contact, something that resonates in his chest. “I miss him,” she says. “We would always talk so much; at night, when no one could hear us. We would talk, about nothing and everything, about whatever interested us; and it was special.”

Jason presses a hand to his face. “I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.”

“He would have liked you.” She sighs, shudders. “He did; he thought you were…a good person…a worthy fighter, a fierce friend. He wanted to get to know you.”

“I don’t even get it; I knew him for what? Forty-eight hours?” Jason doesn’t trust, doesn’t like, easily; it takes a long series of twists and turns, of tests, before he even begins to open up a little bit. “And yet it…” But now Jason sees the fragility of life, and he knows death wants to snatch possibilities; so he has to grab them and hold them close.

“It hurts?”

Jason nods. “I tried to reach them; I tried to get up and warn Clint, protect them, but then Pietro was there and then he…” He wasn’t; and then he wasn’t there. And then he was gone. “I wish it had been me; it should’ve been me. Then Pietro could be here and you would have your brother and he—”

“Then Pietro would be telling me how much he misses you, instead of the other way around; and Steve and Bucky would have had to bury you.”

Would Bruce have come to the funeral, Jason wonders; and then he’s thinking about how his first funeral went. “I was dead, Wanda; it should’ve been me again.”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment; and then she stands abruptly. “But it wasn’t you; it was Pietro. It was my brother, and he would not want you to mope day in and day out over should’ve beens.”

Jason doesn’t take her offered hand, not right away; he lays on the dark blue safety mats for a moment longer. Then, he scrubs his face and launches upward, gripping her hand. “I’m sorry; you’re right.”

She tugs him into a hug. “I miss him,” she whispers. “But it’s easy sharing the pain with someone else.”

Jason doesn’t remember getting many hugs around the tower; sure, Bucky’ll be his pillow during late night’s watching television, or Steve will give him a pat on the shoulder on the way out the door, Bruce might ruffle his hair and Natasha will hold him in a headlock. But hugs? Tender, gentle hugs that have nothing do with nightmares, a hold that has nothing do with bleeding out on the battlefield and needing support?

He doesn’t remember the last time he had a hug like this; he grips her back. “I’m sorry; I want to be here for you.”

She waits until he’s ready to pull away; until he’s moved apart and, once more, scrubs viciously at his face. “You are; I do not talk with you about what I went through in that moment because you’re not that part of my support system. I have Natasha for that, and Clint to help me through it; you? You are here to keep me occupied when I need it, to offer me a shoulder and a companion when the silence grows heavy.”

He grins at her sheepishly. “I’m glad,” he admits before shaking off the heavy emotions. “And here I thought you were only testing how much this puny, hapless human can take.”

Wanda shifts into a fighting stance; she keeps her gaze level on him, hands twisting, and he’s already beginning to see the tendrils of red. “You are not puny or hapless.”

Jason labels this moment as a beginning.


	2. Three words

Wanda knows he knows; she knows he knows that she knows. It’s a near humorous cycle, really, if neither were so ashamed about it. She wants to bring it up, but she doesn’t; instead, she hands him more bullets and he stocks a clip, sets it aside, chooses an empty one. She hands him more bullets.

At night, when the silence does come—it’s always there, lurking somewhere at the edge of her vision—and she can’t fall asleep just yet, she remembers what she did. She remembers the terror, the raw torture she’s put these people through; yet they act like she hasn’t done anything wrong. As if she didn’t pile onto their trauma, as if she doesn’t owe them an apology.

Jason never did let her apologize, and she can’t find a way to form words; to convey to him how terribly sorry she is about what she did to him. About what she saw, in shadowed glimpses on the tip of her consciousness; she saw it all, she heard it all, from everyone. She listened to Natasha fight, she felt Steve’s emptiness, she caught sight of red numbers in the dark and felt the breath leave her lungs.

She wonders if Jason knows she knows he died; Jason knows she saw, but he never goes into detail about life before the Avengers. She’s mentioned Loki before, the other sorcerer; she saw him, once, when Jason’s walls collapsed and she couldn’t block his memories. Sometime after the torture she dealt, when he was shaking at the farmhouse and she was apologizing to Natasha, he had categorized all his memories and slotted them into place, packaging them all up with their subsequent emotions, and she’d felt his raw backlash. Then, his life’s engine roared to life.

He is fueled by his past, and Wanda doesn’t think that’s a good thing; but what does she know?

Every time she opens her mouth to apologize—for her hand in his pain, and to express sympathy for what happened to him—the words get stuck in her throat; she looks into his eyes and she sees power swimming there—green and glorious. Power and pride and she closes her mouth; he doesn’t bring up the fact that he knows, and neither will she.

Funnily enough, he makes it seem so easy; he has no reason to apologize, beyond to say he sympathizes with her or to apologize for the momentary selfishness in bringing up her dead brother and his reactions to it all. And it tears the blood from her veins; she sinks besides him, but ultimately feels renewed in hearing his own emotional response to her brother’s sacrifice.

She knows how the grownups felt, guilty and saddened, but she is not a grownup; she is a child, in heart and dreams, and Jason is—ultimately—one too. He mirrors her thoughts; she had planned for a future, and with Pietro’s last breath she died with him.

In her moments of grief directly after, her magic had pulsed uncontrolled across the room; it had ripped out of her, like the scream that silenced the air around her, and the power had touched another. Briefly, it tore at this intruder, vicious, angry, confused and hurt; her thoughts then were _hurt like me_ but it brought no satisfaction.

She wants to apologize, but she can’t; she opens her mouth and cobwebs form. She formulates her words and they vanish from her.

But she has to, she thinks, or she will continue to live in regret and a pool of guilt; she catches his hand then, grease slicked as he tinkers with another project, having moved on from the guns ages ago. She doesn’t look him in the eyes, too ashamed to do so, and she whispers out an apology.

“I am sorry.”

She doesn’t specify what for; for everything, she thinks, but he slips his hand free and smiles at her as if she hasn’t spoken.

For all she knows, her words have failed her again; but she feels better, as if some blockade that sat between them is slowly crumbling. It’s a start.


	3. On your tongue

Jason awakes at three in the morning to his phone beeping; a text. The screen lights up and flashes and he flicks the password; it opens to a text from Peter.

_Gwen’s dead_

Jason goes to the roof, cellphone in hand; the city is lit up, but on the top of the tower Jason can see the stars. He calls Peter and listens to him cry; he lays down and watches the stars fade as the sun begins to rise, consoles Peter the only way he knows how—listen, bear the burden, ease the weight. He’s never been good with words, not since his resurrection when everything is hidden behind a ten foot concrete wall. He sympathizes, says he’s sorry, and Peter thanks him.

“How did it happen?” Jason asks in tune with a morning dove.

“She was…” hesitation; Jason blinks slowly. “She was getting a story of Spiderman; big fight. She was thrown off a clock tower; Spidey tried to save her, he really did try, and I…” Peter sobs. “I was there, Jay, I couldn’t save her.”

“There’s nothing you could’ve done, Peter.”

“There was! I could’ve been faster, I could’ve been more careful, I should’ve told her to leave!”

Jason closes his eyes and sees a boy with white hair. “You tried though; right?”

Peter huffs an affirmative.

“Then you did good; Gwen wouldn’t want you beating yourself up over this, right? She would’ve wanted you to learn and keep living.”

Jason stays on the phone until Peter falls asleep; then, he hangs up and turns to the door. “You can come out, Wanda.”

“Is Peter going to be alright?” He’s as much her friend as he is Jason’s.

“It’s going to be tough.”

Wanda nods, understanding, and Jason stands to greet her as she approaches closer. “And you?” she asks.

He shrugs. “I’m peachy.”

“Hm…” She’s looking at him again as if she sees something deep, something interesting and confusing.

“What?”

“I want to spar with you.”

“Again?” Jason slumps and scrubs his face. “Wanda, I’ve been up for four hours now; I just want to sleep.”

She steps forward and Jason steps back; it’s not that he’s scared of her, per se, but Wanda gets what Wanda wants most of the time.

“Wanda?”

“We can’t be a good team if you don’t awaken that power in you.”

He grins and flexes. “You mean my charming wit or this badass guns?”

“I mean,” she drawls and he fails to notice her hands twisting. “The power in your blood.”

And then he’s flying backwards—when did he get so close to the edge?—why is he over the edge?—and now he’s falling. He shrieks and loses his phone at one point in the fall; great, he’s gonna die again. Before he can get too close to the ground, he’s being slowed to a near stop, reversed, and pulled just as fast back up. He screams again.

Up on the roof, Wanda steps back from the ledge and Jason is settled on wobbly legs in front of her, panting.

“What the hell?!”

She watches him coolly. “Well? Anything?”

Before he can even articulate a question or a curse, he’s falling again.

In his apartment, Steve is tying on his sneakers for a morning run and Bucky is sipping a cup of coffee at the large bay windows; he chokes on the warm liquid when a body goes screaming pass.

“Was that Jason?”

Steve goes back to tying his shoes. “I think so.”

Jason moves up and Bucky wills his hands to stop shaking. “Was that Wanda’s magic?”

Steve hops up and tests his shoes, stretching. “I think so.”

Jason goes falling again, and Bucky squishes against the window to get a good look; Jason goes up, and so does Bucky’s head. “Is it worrisome that I’m willing to let them keep doing…whatever it is they’re up to?”

Steve walks over to press a kiss to Bucky’s cheek. “No; just means you’re learning to trust him with others.”

Jason screams as he flies down and Steve gives Bucky another kiss before heading out; Bucky makes a remark about not getting hit by Jason’s falling body on the sidewalk.

By the eleventh fall, Jason’s had enough. “What the hell are you trying to do?!”

“What brought you back?” She calmly asks.

Jason shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know! The Pit? Magic?”

Wanda nods. “Then learn to use it.” And he’s falling again.


End file.
